Cook’s research focuses on improving the ability of programming languages to facilitate the development of efficient and maintainable software. His early work focused on the semantic and type-theoretic foundations of object-oriented programming and applying these results to improve widely-used programming languages, including Java. His current near-term research involves developing constructs for distributed and data-centric computing. His longer-term research goal is to develop a theory of model-driven development that enables integration of multiple domain-specific languages needed to build complex interactive software systems, including user interfaces, distributed workflow orchestration, authorization policies, and data/synchronization models.